Willow Tearooms - The Willow Tearooms Today

The Willow Tearooms Today

Following the death of her husband in 1917, Miss Cranston sold her businesses. The Willow Tearooms continued in use under a new name until they were incorporated into Daly's department store in 1928. By 1938 the others had passed into the hands of Cranston's Tearooms Ltd. When this company went into liquidation in 1954 the tearooms were sold and subsequently put to a number of different uses over the years. Though Daly's adapted the Willow Tearooms building as part of their department store, the façade was unchanged above their ground floor plate glass shop window and fascia, the moulded plaster frieze could still be seen above the ground floor shopfittings, and the Room de Luxe remained in use as the department store tea room until they closed around the start of the 1980s.

Extensive restoration work was carried out under the architect Geoffrey Wimpenny of Keppie Henderson, successors of the Honeyman, Keppie and Mackintosh partnership of almost a century earlier. The Willow Tearooms reopened in 1983 with the restored ground floor façade forming the shop front to Henderson the jewellers which occupied the ground floor and the reconstructed gallery.

At the same time the Room de Luxe was refurbished to recreate the original colour scheme, and furnished with reproductions of the high back chairs, though originally there were only eight of these chairs at formal central tables while chairs around the perimeter had lower backs. It was reopened in 1983 by Anne Mulhern, a Glasgow business woman, and in 1996 she also leased the tea gallery at the rear of the building. Today, visitors can once again experience some of the Willow Tearooms as Mackintsoh intended. In 1997 "The Willow" expanded into new Tearooms at 97 Buchanan Street, next door to the original Miss Cranston tearooms. These feature recreations of the original designs that Mackintosh created as the "White Dining Room" and "Chinese Room" for Miss Cranston's nearby Ingram Street tearoom. The tea room however has fallen into disrepair and is now lacking its originally intended atmosphere and quality. Fans of Mackintosh are urgently calling for a more sympathetic restoration.